Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: book vs. film

  

  Writing has always helped authors to cope with tragedy. The way I see it, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, is a novel about grief and how to deal with tragedy in general. The message behind the novel is that tragedy can happen to anyone at any time. We have to be grateful for the people we love and let them know this before it is too late. The thought of losing someone is morbid but it is a reminder to give thanks for what we sometimes take for granted. 

  Let's refresh our minds with this brief summary. Oskar Schell is an extremely smart nine-year old who had recently lost his father in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. He believes his father left him a final puzzle to solve, a message, that was somewhere in the city. He finds a key in his father's closet which gives him an idea to where to start and what lock it opened. He disconnects from his mother because she would only delay him if she knew of his agenda. His active mind led him to an incredible journey which solved the mystery and made him understand the complexity of the world he lived in, since he's been traumatized by his father's death and was afraid of everything.

 

Apart from reading the book, I also saw the film and I liked it. The director made sure to portray what was going on in Oskar's mind quite well. He kept Thomas Schell alive in Oskar's mind throughout the entire movie just as the author did. 

  The first difference, and in my opinion one of the most important one, is that throughout the film we only see things from Oskar's point of view whereas in the novel we have three first-person narrations: Oskar and his grandparents. Nonetheless, the storyline belongs to Oskar who tells us every thought he has. His grandparents have also their stories that are set in different time frames and consequently are not related to Oskar's narrative. We see the importance of these at the end of the book. In the movie, the director integrated the three stories as if it was one. This, the presence of letters, and the flipbook presented at the end on the book are what causes this book to have a unique writing style. In other words, the use of multi-genre in one work.

As can be see, we see more details about the characters in the book than in the film. The novel has wide-ranging details regarding the characters and their biographies.It is because of the projection of the storyline that many details are not included in the film. The movie focused only in Oskar's life and not the complex history that his grandparents have, diminishing the plot. This makes the audience focus more on the impact that this attack had on the victim's families and how each tried to find desperately closure with their loved ones. Both, the film and the novel, demonstrated how the World Trade Center attack is probably one of the most horrible national catastrophe of our generation since it profoundly changed innumerable things in our country.

This video reminded me of Oskar's Flipbook